The Ides of March

Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar … The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it …
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all; all honourable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral …
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man….
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason…. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

It’s National Backstabbed By Your Friends Day.

Seriously, 15 March is the infamous Ides of March when 2054 years ago, G. Julius Caesar, the original whose name became a title, was stabbed to death in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. Here’s to the original Renaissance Man… when the things brought back during the Renaissance were having their original date in the sun. Marc Antony, who William Shakespeare would write a terrific speech for 1600 years later, dressed in slave clothes and ran away but gave a speech on the rostra that afternoon. Some people may wonder what the big deal is all about, but those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Think on the date for a moment how easily democracy can be taken away, how you have to stand for something or you’ll stand for anything, and how precarious power can be. And I’m not talking about Caesar, but the plotters who thought, in their blindness, that if they killed him, the old republic would come back. Little did they know that they killed it when they killed him and democracy wouldn’t be seen again until the Colonies broke with Britain. They had no plan, they only had jealousy and fear for their privileges which they felt his reforms were eroding. Think about that, especially with the big tug of war going on now In Washington.